The Open Platform
We're preserving critical Open Data (including HIFLD) and making it usable in a real-time map.
Open Data, Operationalized
Open data ensures that critical information is not siloed, restricted, or lost. It fuels research, transparency, innovation, and public good. When data is open, everyone—from governments to businesses to communities—can build on it.
No Lock-In, Ever
Too many platforms lock users into proprietary formats or workflows. SeerAI was built to be the opposite: open to any format, any compute, any visualization. Data should serve your needs, not the limitations of a platform.
The Importance of HIFLD
The Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) program has been a trusted resource for infrastructure data across the U.S. It supports policy, emergency management, and research. With its discontinuation in August 2025, preserving access is critical.
Geodesic as a Flexible Platform
Our Geodesic platform wasn't built as a traditional ETL tool—but it can work that way. Users can connect to raw sources, process them flexibly, and publish outputs in the formats they need, without being forced into a rigid pipeline.
How We Preserved HIFLD
To ensure continued access, we:
- Leveraged Databricks and our custom Spark implementation to process the majority of the HIFLD archive
- Wrote the datasets into parquet files stored in a public Google Cloud bucket
- Connected them to Geodesic and published as vector tile tokens
- Made both the bucket and the tile services freely open to the public
An ETL Exception
Although we typically steer our users away from thinking ETL-first, this is an exception. We first connected to all the HIFLD data and made it usable in Geodesic. When we heard HIFLD was being decommissioned, we made plans to use our already established connections to make an archive. You can have your cake and eat it too.
Direct Access
For developers and data enthusiasts who want direct access to the archive:
How to use: The layer sidebar is on the left (collapsed by default). Expand it to show/hide layers and adjust styles. Scroll past the map to the catalog below, then check a dataset to load it on the map (max 5). Zoom with +/− buttons or hold Ctrl/⌘ and scroll on desktop. Drag to pan. Click features for details.
Dataset Catalog
Browse or search below. Check a dataset to load it on the map; uncheck to remove. (You can load up to 5 at once.)
License & Attribution
The HIFLD archive provided by SeerAI is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
✓You are free to:
iUnder the following terms:
Full license text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/